Gukesh Tops 2025 Grand Chess Tour Lineup, With Sao Paulo Finals Added

World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju, defending Champion GM Alireza Firouzja, and 2023 Champion GM Fabiano Caruana top the nine-player lineup for the $1.6 million 2025 Grand Chess Tour. GMs Levon Aronian and Jan-Krzysztof Duda, who replace GMs Ian Nepomniachtchi and Anish Giri, are the only changes from 2024, but, for the first time since 2019, there's going to be a four-player Tour Finals, to be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil.    

When 17-year-old Gukesh was announced as a participant in the 2024 Grand Chess Tour, he was the second-lowest rated of the nine players. A year later and, still the youngest player, he now tops the field as the world number-three and world champion.

Grand Chess Tour 2025 Regular Players

Firouzja (1st), Caruana (2nd), and GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (3rd) qualify automatically based on where they finished in the 2024 series.

"The remaining players were invited based on a number of factors, including URS rating, FIDE rating, fighting spirit, and sportsmanship," says the Grand Chess Tour press release, with two-time Tour Champion GM Wesley So (4th), GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu (5th), Gukesh (6th), and GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov (7th) also invited back. Those missing out on a return invite are Nepomniachtchi (8th) and Giri (9th).

The new players this year, Aronian and Duda, are both veterans of the Tour and were also both involved in 2024 as wildcards. This time, as full Tour members, they'll play the two classical events, in Bucharest and St. Louis (with a $350,000 prize fund each), and two of the three rapid and blitz events ($175,000). It's notable that Duda will get a chance to prove himself at classical chess after he mentioned in a Chess.com interview that he'd considered quitting chess and had turned down invites to Wijk aan Zee and Prague.

A surprise absence, perhaps, is world number-five GM Arjun Erigaisi, while we've become used to world numbers one and two Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura not playing as full Tour participants. It's very likely, however, that they'll feature among the wild cards to individual events.  

The schedule looks as follows:

Grand Chess Tour 2025 Schedule

What stands out is that for the first time since 2019—when Vachier-Lagrave beat Carlsen in the Semifinals in London before losing to GM Ding Liren in the Final—we're going to have an extra four-player Finals to decide the title. The venue, Sao Paulo in Brazil, recalls another series, the Grand Slam, that in 2011-12 saw six stars compete in the Finals held in a glass box in the middle of that sprawling metropolis of 12 million people. Carlsen won both events on tiebreaks, in 2011 against GM Vasyl Ivanchuk, and in 2012 against Caruana.

 

The other thing to note is that while the six-leg Grand Chess Tour has been carefully scheduled not to clash with the biggest FIDE or Freestyle Chess events, it's going to be an incredibly busy year for the top players, with the FIDE Grand Swiss (September 3-14, Samarkand) and FIDE World Cup (November 1-26) also on the horizon. For instance, in April and May we have this sequence of events, with only occasional free days between events:

• April 7-14: Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Paris
• April 17-21: Grenke Freestyle Chess Open
• April 24-May 1: Superbet Rapid & Blitz Poland
• May 5-17: Superbet Chess Classic Romania

• May 20-26: Tepe Sigeman Chess Tournament

• May 26-June 6, Norway Chess

It's going to be tough for the players, but it's a great time to be a chess fan!